Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.

...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.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

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

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

Each man kills the thing he loves.