Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.