To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.
Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
Fumbling for a word is everybody’s birthright.
We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
I’ve always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.
Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.
I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.
A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he’s supposed to be doing.
I don’t write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.
In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Any book has behind it all the other books that have been written.
For the serious artist does not satisfy needs.
I mean, there’s little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you’re going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.
Rome’s just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I’d say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.