“Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.”

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

I know there isn’t no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn’t no fear, either.” Piggy paused. “Unless-” Ralph moved restlessly. “Unless what?” “Unless we get frightened of people.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

I’ve come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.