The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

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.

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