“I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.”

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.

Which is better — to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better — to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It’s as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.” “If you don’t blow, we’ll soon be animals anyway.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

You can shut down a service, and yet people will find ways to communicate.

It’s the consciousness that has come into us from other experiences and our consciousness that we remain aware of when we leave our bodies and they communicate with us through dreams, and even through drawings which I do a lot of work with myself.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

Confidentiality is the nature of all governments. Of course you may say, the government will always want to communicate the good news; things which bring satisfaction, cheer, help or pleasure to voters. And of course, you are right, governments are not masochists by nature.

Consciousness is non-local and does not depend on words to communicate.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.