Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.