Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
The trouble is I don’t believe my unbelief.
That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.
Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
Love taught me that your honour did but jest.
I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?
Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.
It’s a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.
No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.
For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Destruction after all is a form of creation.
Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.
For a good man fame is always a problem.
The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.
Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing.