Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.