For a good man fame is always a problem.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

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

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.