Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

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

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

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

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

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