Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.