If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

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

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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.

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

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