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

And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.

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.

Be happy with those who are happy, and cry with those who are crying.

Be happy with those who are happy, and cry with those who are crying.

The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.

The life we live is just a colourful and deposit toy. Some of us take it so seriously and fight and cry for it. Some of us break and throw it. Either we give extreme importance, either not enough. Better to stay far from extremes.

You cry and tell yourself to toughen up but what’s tougher than feeling?

We were born crying. Therefore, we must try at any cost; to keep a smile on the face.

When the world cries I cry. and when the world sings I still find myself crying.

Heaven has not learned of my arrival, and my departure will not in the least diminish it beauty and grandeur. I will sleep underground, for us ephemeral mortals, the only eternity is the moment and drinking to the moment is better than weeping for it.