A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

Death was far more certain than God.

The problem of pretending to be alive.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.