The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

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

confession ran in the family.

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

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.