It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

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

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.