For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.