The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

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.

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.