“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”

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.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

You’ll get back to where you came from.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

I’m not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I’d seen him. Maybe I wasn’t who I’d thought I was either.

But I can’t confront the doubts I have. I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I’m condemning the future to death so it can match the past.

Maybe the nails are a little stubby and gnawed on, but I definitely do not have man hands.

[Cultural departments] don’t care about culture. Maybe they’re the furthest from the people who understand culture.

Maybe that’s why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

I didn’t see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me.

Something to pay attention to and maybe change direction.

Maybe one day there will finally be an education for electronic music.