The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol – brighter than my students at university.
As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.
I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.
Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.
But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world’s literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.
Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.
The complex develops out of the simple.
The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one’s own potentialities.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.
In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it’s the feeling there’s something basically wrong with human beings.
I’m basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren’t interested in ideas. The English, I’m afraid, are totally brainless.
The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I’d find it an extremely difficult conflict because I’d be basically disinclined to accept.
The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
The “passion for incredulity” can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.