“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

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.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

My memories of camp – I was four years old to eight years old – they’re fond memories.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn’t believe the poems I’d bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.

My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

Heartbreak can trigger childhood wounds.