"Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her."

"And like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring."

"Death is not in the nature of things, it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal."

"Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities."

"Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived."

"These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision."

"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."

"But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction."

"Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters."

"In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters."

"People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.The black and the black and the black."

"I left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."

"But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met."

"Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man."

"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape."

"Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them."

"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."

"The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face."

"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."

"There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world."

"But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating."