The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

My life is short. I can't listen to banality.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.