Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

The least stupid question a man asks in his lifetime is not: Is there a God and is He a god or a devil? But: Brother, why are you killing me?

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.