All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.