A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I didn't think; I experimented.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Every dogma has its day.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

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

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

Bath twice a day to be really clean once a day to be passably clean once a week to avoid being a public menace.

If you believe in an unseen Christ you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Laugh and the world laughs with you snore and you sleep alone.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community

Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore, and you sleep alone!

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.