Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.
Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.
I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.
...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
...the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.
It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.
laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.
Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!
I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.
It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.
Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?
Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.
I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
As we grow older, the memories of early life brighten, those of maturity and senescence grow dim and confused.
You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.
Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?
The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.
What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.
It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.
It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.
Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.
Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.
It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.
Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?