Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.