It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.