“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”

“It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.”

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”

“after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.”

“Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.”

“I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!”

“Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.”