I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
My little cup brims with tiddles.
I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.
She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.
Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.
Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.
Solitude was corrupting me.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.