How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.