People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.
What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually – our sense of personality is a sense of outrage...
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out – unique to oneself, one’s own, one’s claim to identity, it implicates one’s identity in its fibbing.
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.
Don’t you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same...
I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.
A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen’s Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen’s Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.
I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market – you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won’t get over the right stile...
One can suffer a convulsion of one’s entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences.
Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.
Silence sat in the taxi, as though a stranger had got in.
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called ‘eternal.’ What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Autumn arrives in the early morning.
Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life – the first twenty years of it – had about them something semi-fictitious.