Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

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.

A death is the most terrible of facts.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.