The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.