It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
The world began in hazard and will end in it.
They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.
The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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