Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.