We forget very easily what gives us pain.

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

I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.