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.

One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.