A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

...youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

I didn't think; I experimented.

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.