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

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.