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.
Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.
The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
I suspect victims; they win in the long run.
Raids are slightly constipating.
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
All my life I have said, “Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs” – and what a mistake.