Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

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.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.