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

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.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

Hitting the bottle again, ever than I’ve drunker been. Or is it drunker than I’ve ever been?

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

Elizabeth. Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what’s the problem?

A feeling of violation swayed inside me, making me feel as if id been shoved off a high platform without warning. I was falling, and i feared the sensation far more than hitting bottom. There was no end; just a constantsense of gravity having its way with me.