[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing..

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy..

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspect….

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually ….

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity..

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years..

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be..

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them..

He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Selflove seems so often unrequited..

A dance to the music of time..

I get a warm feeling among my books..

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you..

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work..

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it..

You have to be a product of the product..

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unco….

He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, li….

Writing is above all a question of instinct..

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, the….

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since t….

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life..