I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.