The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.