A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

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.

It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.