If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.