I’m not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
Literature is analysis after the event.
This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
I don’t know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.
We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
No one’s noticed. So much is destroyed, we can’t be bothered.
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.
In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say – he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
What I had that others didn’t was a capacity for sticking to it.
Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.
We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.