If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?

Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.

Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

When did you get so clever?""When I realized I wasn't as clever as I thought.

The truest family is the family of faith.

There are men who dig for gold

Are we running away from home?” I asked, giving voice to the question that had been on my mind for two days, ever since the lady at the Wok On restaurant asked where we were from and my mother

Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.

I get called 'Memphis Eve,' but my first name is Eve. I know Memphis is in there somewhere, but on my passport I'm 'Eve Sunny Day Hewson.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.

In '48 when I left Metro, I tried to go back to radio, but somehow just didn't do well at it.

The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

If you're not playing a big enough game, you'll screw up the game you're playing just to give yourself something to do.