Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

All good novelists have bad memories.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

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