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

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

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.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.