The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.
So the Bible is not so sad in the end?’ ‘Yes, it is the saddest book in the world. We are asked to believe that God has played an infantile trick on us: he has made himself unobservable, as an eternal...
She was so beautiful I had to move away.
It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer’s billiard table.
It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marveled in later life were...
I've met men I would trust in the mouth of hell. Byrne or Douglas. I would trust them to breathe for me, to pump my blood with their hearts.Did you love them best? Would they be the ones you'd choose?...
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.
Albert Einstein wrote, ‘A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the...
A problem is only insoluble to the sufferer; to others, it may have a comic or exasperating simplicity. It occurred to me that at this juncture I had become locked in, like one of my wretched patients...
There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and...
She had discovered that ageing and what they called maturity were myths, that all the years did was disqualify you from various pleasures, one by one.
This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded.
This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.
They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated...
They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had w...
There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.
Then under the indifferent sky his spirit left the body with its ripped flesh, its infections, its weak and damaged nature. While the rain fell on his arms and legs, the part of him that still lived w...
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust.
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.