All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.