It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.