To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.