You can't go home and listen to Chopin, and just use it.

I'm not sure that Van Gogh got up in the morning and looked at the crows and the bizarre clouds and went damn that's a good painting, you know? No, he considered shooting himself, and one day he did.

I like to write adventure stories; that's what I tell myself. But you can't help letting your own personality, your own experiences, slip through.

We think literature is immortal, but even that decays and ultimately turns to dust.

Every invention eventually becomes obsolete.

I think the word is counter-productive. Capitalism is counter-productive to art, just as the Catholic Church was counter-productive to art four hundred years ago.

I was always totally convinced that three weeks after the revolution they'd put me up against the wall and shoot me.

I was exactly having fun. I was stone miserable, but I wasn't hating doing it; I was loving doing it, but it's just damaged and warped.

There are plenty of chances in life, what's important is what you make of them.

The stars will go out before I forget you, Mark Blackthorn.

He [Widmerpool] moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

Somehow, people get very nervous about leaving the comfortable life of rules behind and never take the chance to develop their own internal voice, to listen to their own consciousness.

When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us.

I think what makes people think that is because of things people write. It really doesn't have anything to do with the artist.

Average is a failing plan! Average doesn't work in any area of life. Anything that you give only average amounts of attention to will start to subside and will eventually cease to exist.

Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

O my Saviour, who am I, that Thou shouldst have so long awaited my repentance!