“An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.”

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

I know there isn’t no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn’t no fear, either.” Piggy paused. “Unless-” Ralph moved restlessly. “Unless what?” “Unless we get frightened of people.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

I’ve come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense.

However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.

What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.

Whatever you tax you get less of.

Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase “missional church” lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.

Greenspan, who knew so much more than most, knew far less than most supposed.