Paul Bowles Quotes

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postw...

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond li...

Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like,...

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he...

The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for he...

There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate. (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) And it looks to...

And its derivatives are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Moslem lands, is freely drunk; be...

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some...

Security is a false god begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.

He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to anoth...

There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.

The rest of the world was there for her to take at any moment she wished it, but she always rejected it in favour of her own familiar little cosmos.

Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga’a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertai...

Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it,...

Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

How could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible.

Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.

La humanidad es todos salvo uno mismo.Entonces, ¿Qué interés puede tener para nadie?

I think that's the point of view of an outsider, a tourist who puts picturesqueness above everything else.