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

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.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.