“His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.”

One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

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

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

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.

Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

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.

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

We’re not savages. We’re English.

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

I hated singing and getting up in front of crowds.

It’s just people should realize that the celebrity aspect of being an actor is very rarely enjoyable for people like me who would always rather go unnoticed and disappear into the crowd.

The greater the silence, the greater meaning it carries. The greater crowded, the greater loneliness. The greater love, the greater pain.

Come out of the masses. Stand alone like a lion and live your life according to your own light.

The crowd…a cacophony of colour.

I still find myself searching the crowds for your face.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.