I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.
I couldn’t have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.
So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn’t be spoken aloud when you are happy.
They think my mother’s ashes are marijuana.
I had committed myself: without love I’d have to go through the gestures of love.
Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.
She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.
I can’t talk you in terms of time – your time and my time are different.
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.
Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.
All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.