In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

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.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.