Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?