each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.