Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

As long as one suffers one lives.