We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate. - Iris Murdoch

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.