The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'

She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him. What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another. Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.

There seemed nothing to do but live.