Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.

With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?