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.
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.
Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.
You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It’s like having a totally efficient contraceptive.
Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy enough to be German. We arrive at his Englishry by pure elimination.
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.
The next morning I woke up at oh eight oh oh hours, my brothers, and as I still felt shagged and fagged and fashed and bashed and my glazzies were stuck together real horrorshow with sleepglue, I thought I would not go to school.
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Each man kills the thing he loves.
I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.
This must be a real horrorshow film if you’re so keen on my viddying it.
When the State withers, humanity flowers.
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.