I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.