Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

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.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.