I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

The most difficult aspect of moving on is accepting that the other person already did.

The test we must set for ourselves is not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.

The sound circulated like an autonomous being whose tentacles needed to experience a sensitive awareness of the terrain.

A coward is a man who'd rather live dead than die alive

Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us, yet if we withhold ourselves from that blood, we will be unclean forever.

I don't have to have the biggest house or the biggest car or the longest mink, but quality of life is really glamorous.

When a tree, a natural product, is felled, is society put into possession of no greater produce than that of the mere labour of the woodman?

Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.

Of many, imagined blessings it may be doubted whether he that wants or possesses them had more reason to be satisfied with his lot.

We laugh heartily to see a whole flock of sheep jump because one did so. Might not one imagine that superior beings do the same, and for exactly the same reason?