Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left