The books I haven’t written are better than the books other people have.
There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Sheep with a nasty side.
A woman’s desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
A great writer created a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.
Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.