“Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!”

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.

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.

Your words may dim her light and make her cry, but you can never douse her flames how much ever you try.

I cry because I don’t know how to help you, but I can’t even help myself.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.

And all the stars in the deep blue sky are the tears of the moon; the ones he cried while dreaming about the sun

It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone, it’s not unusual to have fun with anyone. But when I see you hanging about with anyone, it’s not unusual to see me cry. I wanna’ die.

He always preferred the way my eyes looked after they had cried. I wish he knew how fine they looked once he had said goodbye.

Have the courage to laugh in the places you have cried.