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

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.

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

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

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.