If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

It is important not to trust people too much.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.