You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they’re right.
All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other’s way, what a tangle.
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
I can’t bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There’s something so dead about a finished painting.
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is – its irresistible charm – a fire.
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You’re on the edge of normality.
Looking foolish does the spirit good.
I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
It’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
There are some women that don’t do it for some men. That’s why they turn out so many models.