That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.