Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

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.