Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self