“I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.”

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.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

The greatest pleasure is not – say – sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity – well, that’s the job of the writer.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.

The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

The greatest ideas are the simplest.

Are we savages or what?

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

Ralph… would treat the day’s decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

…Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.

These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message