The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.