 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. |
| We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to. |
| Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. |
| The world is not black and white. More like black and grey. |
| When we are not sure, we are alive. |
| I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman. |
| In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. |
| Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism. |
| A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. |
| The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. |
| Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are. |
| No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness. |
| My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane. |
| 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. |
| Failure too is a form of death. |
| Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years. |
| Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance. |
| It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. |
| A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority. |
| The world doesn't make any heroes anymore. |
