Every artist is an unhappy lover.

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.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

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

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

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