To be a complete victim may be another source of power.

we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

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

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.