Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

the mute protest in your own bones

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.