Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

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

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Being in love is an exhausting business.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.