The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.