Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.