...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

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

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 can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.

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