To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.

Part of living, part of becoming a wise man or a wise woman, is to get to that point where you can have a friend for whom you are genuinely happy when he or she has a success. That's tough. Very few people get to that point. With writers it's next to impossible. You can't really bless a writer who's as good as yourself.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.