The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.
Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.
Let us hope, I prayed, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.
Every novel should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.
You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?
Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
Try the Lamentations of Jeremiah. They always pick me up.
Exercise is an unnatural act.
If there’s anything I hate it’s the word humorist-I feel like countering with the word seriousist.
All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.
Deep down, he’s shallow.
The greatest experience open to man then is the recovery of the commonplace. Coffee in the morning and whiskeys in the evening again without fear. Books to read without that shadow falling across the page.
It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate. The scattered particles of self – love, wood thrush calling, homework sums, broken nerves, rag dolls, one Phi Betta Kappa key, gold stars, lamplight smiles, night cries, and the shambles of contemplation – are collected for a split moment like scraps of shrapnel before they explode.
So we were back in the Children’s Pavilion, and there was again the familiar scene: the mothers with their nearly dead, the false face of mercy, the Slaughter of the Innocents.
A man has to believe in something, and I believe I’ll have another drink.
I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.
You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it’s all a tale told by an idiot.
I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race.