There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphan...
Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.
Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.
So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.
If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.
I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my...
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who — w...
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love,...
How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a god made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any god wo is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as the air.
They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about . . .
They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.They don't want communism.They want enough rice, I said. They don't...
There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.
There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he...
She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present - she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from t...