If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

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 melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.