The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.

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.

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.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?