You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

Adulterers, take warning, never admit.