. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?