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.

Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.