The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog...

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

A word (…) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (…) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating.

Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn...

I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong...

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

The dead live.” “How do they live?” “By love.

I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.””I think you may be.”I smiled dubiously. “Thank you.””It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

I needed a new mystery.

Some people would say- you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance...

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His...

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then...

Tavainimene on tsivilisatsiooni nuhtlus. Aga tema on juba ebatavaliselt tavaline.

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons:...

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will...

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone — had only to be...

I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

Armastan elada täisverelist elu, armastan kõiki, kes lihtsalt ei istu ja jälgi.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?”For fun?”Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

…and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It’s...

She’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’ ‘Prose and pudding?”I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

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.

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a...

I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that...

…there are times when silence is a poem.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was...

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it…fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away...

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was...

Labor is a man crowning glory.””Not this man’s.””I quote Marx”I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.”I quote blisters.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need – an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.’You’re being very silent.”That’s how men cry.

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.

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.Humanity both...

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.

Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt...