 There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. |
| Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. |
| Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. |
| He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong. |
| A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous. |
| Reality in our century is not something to be faced. |
| 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. |
| Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline. |
| Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully. |
| Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share. |
| They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness. |
| Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. |
| People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery. |
| 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. |
| If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask? |
| Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. |
| God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution. |
| Heresy is another word for freedom of thought. |
| Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast. |
