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

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 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.

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.

How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at some place that you’re familiar with?

It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate.

I’m expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help communicate a role as a human being in a movie, I will do that.

I think the performances that really communicate with me are the ones where I don’t feel like I’m watching someone and thinking: “They’re doing some really good acting.”

The most important thing in this world is faith. Without faith you cannot communicate with God.

As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am.

As long as I can communicate, I’m not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn’t matter at all.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn’t communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.