I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

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

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.