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.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

Being in love is an exhausting business.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.