Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan – that is the rule.
How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?
There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.
Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
Death is the room that is always empty.
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.
Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.
The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.
Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.