The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.