Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.

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

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

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.