There’s a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it’s much more developed than in others. It’s a different balance which makes us all different.

I don’t like to listen to music while I’m working.

It was hard to reassure grown-ups when you weren’t certain yourself what you were feeling and thinking – when thoughts dissolved before you could name them.

I have a painter’s memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

When there’s a terrible murder people who are interviewed say, ‘This has always been a quiet neighborhood.’ That is so dumb and uninformed! The earth is not a quiet neighborhood. There isn’t anyplace that’s a quiet neighborhood. People are asking themselves how to stay neat in the cyclone.

People steal into one’s consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

In my early twenties, that’s when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

I’ve always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I’ve seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they’ve stayed with me and comforted me.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one’s vision of the past.

If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog – you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.