Life is, of course, terrible.
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.
If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange – meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.
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.
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.