It is important not to trust people too much.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

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

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

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