“Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.”

“Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.”

“The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.”

“People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.”

“the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith”

“The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.”