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.
He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.
It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.
Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
The world began in hazard and will end in it.
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.
I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.