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

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

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.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

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

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

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