“Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.”

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?

I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.