I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done.

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?