... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

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

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.