“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

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.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.