“There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.”

One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of riches.

The great mass of people are worthy of our respect.

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

I am the punishment of God, If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good.

The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.

Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.