The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

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

Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.

When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view

Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.