To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.