It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.