I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.