Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

The bell that measures time is ringing

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.