Criminals interest me, because they’re driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.
If I’d stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you’re being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that “the world” would decline to recognize them.
Phenomenology is not a philosophy ; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.
I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne’s Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.
The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.
Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.
If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to ‘slow down’ when you look at a tree or a puddle?
As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.
I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.
Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.
But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world’s literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.
Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.
The complex develops out of the simple.
The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one’s own potentialities.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.