The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.

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.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

HE didn't realize she was his everything until he gave her up for everything else.

You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.

In every country where there is a vicious oppression, a peaceful and a continuous civil disobedience is the magical door opening to the freedom!

Faith is the force of life.

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.

Watergate is not the sort of issue that changes the vote. I don't know anyone who has changed their vote because of it.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

A fish probably has no means of apprehending the existence of water; it is too deeply immersed in it.

Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.