Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles.

I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world.

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.