“Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals.”

“The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.”

“I think a writer is not an ideal husband. . . . Writers tend to get off into their own heads and not notice the people that they’re living with, or they get irritable with the people that they’re living with when the people insist on being noticed.”

“It's the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die - sometimes the very best people. That's the way of the world.”

“Worse, she already knew that there were bitter people devoted to the morbid ideal of the presutural cannibalism of appeasement that they defined as peace”

“Damn the human stomach, this fat betrayor of ideals”