Everything gets horrible. Everything you see gets ugly. Lurid is the word. Doctor Garton said lurid, one time. That's the right word for it. And everything sounds harsh, spiny and harsh sounding, like every sound you hear all of a sudden has teeth. And smelling like I smell bad even after I just got out of the shower. It's like what's the point of washing if everything smells like I need another shower

The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.