Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.