My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.