The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

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

My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.