One gets started, and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use . . . the moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.