If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories_back into the present, back into reality: the appalling present, the awful reality_but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.

Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.

He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knewit, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent deliriumof his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!