Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

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 complex develops out of the simple.

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

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?