All good novelists have bad memories.

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

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?