I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.