But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure..

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon ….

For the serious artist does not satisfy needs.

Elgar is not manic enough to be Russian, not witty or pointilliste enough to be French, not harmonically simple enough to be Italian and not stodgy e….

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy..

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world..

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing..

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opp….

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon..

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else..

It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds….

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in t….

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse..

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange ….

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics..

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the se….

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicke….

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's s….

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything wit….

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with se….

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright..