“Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.”

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.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.

Any guy who can maintain a positive attitude without much playing time certainly earns my respect.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

The world is certainty a sudden place.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn’t say the ones at my school were less capable. They could’ve been there.

The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.