Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.