The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

After love a formal feeling comes.

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.