There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world.
Time is not a road – it is a room.
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.
The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
Science disembodies; art embodies.
Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
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.