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

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 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.

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

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

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