Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

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

I didn't think; I experimented.

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?