We do not pass twice through the same door Or return to the door through which we did not pass.

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.

What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Most contemporary novels are not really "written." They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication; and what part of a novel is not composed of these noises consists of a prose which is no more alive than that of a competent newspaper writer or government official. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.