It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
Art is the triumph over chaos.
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
The short story is the literature of the nomad.
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books. You read the books they write for little children and you’ll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
You can’t expect to communicate with anyone if you’re a bore.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.