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

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.