“Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.”

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 have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.

Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.

The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.

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

Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn’t seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.