How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

A cat only has itself.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.