Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.