It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

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.

evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.