There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common – a need to create an alternative world.
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.
The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
Edith Sitwell’s interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to ‘lesser’ life on this planet.
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.