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

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

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

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.

They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.