Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

Very often history is a means of denying the past.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.