He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I've reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even...
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Malnutrition is much safer for the rich than starvation. Starvation makes a man desperate. Malnutrition makes him too tired to raise a fist. The Americans understand that well – the aid they give us m...
You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh.
What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.
What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.
There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself...
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, a...
That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begi...
Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be...
Nunca nos acostumbramos a ser menos importantes para los demás de lo que ellos lo son para nosotros.
Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but d...
It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.
It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield...
In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.