I didn't think; I experimented.

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.

I always thought records were there to be broken.

There was endometrial tissue outside of where it belonged, and the cancer developed from that.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

Placing the ball in the right position for the next shot is eighty percent of winning golf.

I don't know why, but women in a hair salon share their deepest secrets.

Stress appears in your life because you have a rigid view of 'This is the way the world should be,' and the Universe pays scant regard to your desires. And you refuse to accept this.

After I found April Barrows, I felt I had found a soul mate. Her stuff is exactly what I was looking for.

I was a director and dialogue and acting coach.

My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the baby boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

The biggest risk to Quebec isn't sovereignty. It is staying in Canada.

The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.

I think when you play a role, you always have to be a defense attorney for that character.

There's something to be said for any boy growing up among lots of other boys who like to play basketball and football, while all I wanted to do was put on musicals. Mentally, I was always in my own world.