Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?