What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

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.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.