How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.