Writing is making sense of life.

Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.