Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.