Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

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

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.