There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

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.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.