"I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know."

"Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked."

"Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist."

"Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land."

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them wil…"

"His [a terrorist's] primary objective is not battle. It is to bring down upon the community in general a reprisal for…"

"It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness."

"It's unthinkable not to love — you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin."

"The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time … love lavished on absolut…"

"That house with its remoteness and the islands going down like soft gongs all the time into the amazing blue, and I s…"