“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”

It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy.

The squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

There’s a lot to be concerned about; there’s more to be hopeful for.

It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

You have a right to be angry with the perpetrator, regardless of who it was, how long ago the sexual abuse occurred, or how much he/she has changed.

You can make a point without being personal. Don’t insult or belittle your people. Instead of getting more out of them you will get less

Nobody has that vulnerability any more. We turn to child models in an instinctive search for that innocence and freshness, but they don’t have the deep feminine sexuality that came from Marilyn like light.

The more things you own, the more people you need to employ.

I’ve been right more than I’ve been wrong.