Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.