There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

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.

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.