But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

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

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.