Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.