Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.