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.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

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

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

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