You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we – we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, ‘Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,’ reducing it to a simple formula.
What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it’s not my world.
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.