The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.