For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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.

Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.