One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.