Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

I don't understand writers who feel they shouldn't have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary: one has to keep in touch with that... The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

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

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.