Quoting Iris Murdoch

Snatches of The Black Prince keep coming back to me, some two years after I read it. This passage (the book's last) I can still quote from memory:

I hear it has even been suggested that both Bradley Pearson and I are both fictions, inventions of a minor novelist. Fear will inspire any hypothesis. No, no. I exist. And Bradley existed. Here upon the desk as I write these words stands the little bronze of the buffalo lady. Also, a gilt snuff box. And Bradley Pearson's story remains too, a kind of thing more durable than these. Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.


(Mostly correct, I think, although I don't have the book beside me for reference.)