A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.

And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.