My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together