A page of good prose remains invincible.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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

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.

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