One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

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.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

Anything that consoles is fake.

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.