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

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

life is a succession of readjustments.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.