In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

History is the lies of the victors.

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.