Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.