Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.