“If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?”

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.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

The day you stop doing the small things is the day you think you’re above everybody else.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.

If you train your mind to search for the positive things about other people.

When Celtic get an opportunity to go above Rangers they’ve got to jump at it with both hands.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.