The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.

Two-thirds of my energies go in trying to save one-third for work.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

What we need is endless courage.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.