I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little.
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it’s all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
I am infinitely strange to myself.
I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.
The best wines take the longest to mature.
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can’t you understand? I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
The great majority of modern third-person narration is “I” narration very thinly disguised.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts.
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.