I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.