Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

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.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.