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.
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.
I don’t think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me.
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.
He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.