I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.