All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
But what I do I do because I like to do.
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
He said it was artificial respiration but now I find I’m to have his child.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.
Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.
Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.
For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
I didn’t think; I experimented.
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Death comes along like a gas bill one can’t pay.
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.