A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

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

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

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.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

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.