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Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.

"This grey’s sort of depressing.”

What on earth has that got to do with anything?“It’s a question of aesthetics, Em. We should always strive to fill our lives with beauty.”

I don’t see anything beautiful in something that was designed to kill people.

“There’s beauty in everything, Em. You just have to learn to look for it.”If you’re going to preach at me, I think I’ll just curl up and go back to sleep.

Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be.

The word “coincidence” always seems to start religious arguments for some reason.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear.

I don’t like to contaminate a good story with truth, Em. That’d be a violation of my artistic integrity, wouldn’t it?

The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.

I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.

I love my life, I like to be cosmopolitan, I would like to visit the whole earth and love it all.

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.

I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles.