Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.