The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

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

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

Failure too is a form of death.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.