Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

You have to be a product of the product.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.