Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.

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