There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.

I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior pieces for the world rather than to express something I deeply feel or wish to say.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.