Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
I couldn’t help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I’ve forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
He had stylized himself – life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.
Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
All good novelists have bad memories.
What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.
My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
Doing nothing, badly.
He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
Death was far more certain than God.
A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced.
I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.