“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”

“He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.”

“Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make ones living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilizatio...”

“How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.”

“Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back ti...”

“What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipw...”

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

“Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat ...”

“The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival”