I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

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.

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

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

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.

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