Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

All good novelists have bad memories.