"I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self."

"It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love."

"Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."

"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit."

"Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures."

"One can't love humanity. One can only love people."

"There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks."

"One gets so hopelessly tired of deception."

"For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you " with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell " can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap."

"He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance."

"Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it."

"When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination."

"He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye."

"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."

"As long as one suffers one lives."

"Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy."

"Innocence is a kind of insanity."

"The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."

"Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God " a being capable of understanding."

"So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."

"She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there."

"It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."

"Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years."

"It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover."

"A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge. If you knew how little you had to revenge."

"You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."

"I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing."

"I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend."

"My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman."

"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"

"Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge."

"The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

"That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn."

"Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something."

"She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy."

"We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."

"Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did."

"They killed him because he was too innocent to live."

"He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form."

"A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street."

"We forget very easily what gives us pain."

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?"