All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.