All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

People die when curiosity goes.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

I don't reread my books.

I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.

My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.

One of the things that probably drew me to writing was that it was something you could get on with by yourself. Publishing means going public. But the actual activity could scarcely be more invisible. And private.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you and you've got to do it again?

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

There is a certain inescapable attachment. If you are born somewhere and circumstances don't take you away from it, then you grow up and remain within it.

There's an undeniable thrill in seeing what's most current in our lives offered back to us in fictional guise, but it soon dates and it's never enough.

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult.

Vegetation is the basic instrument the creator uses to set all of nature in motion.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

I'm inspired by nature. Other artist's work is important for developing my perception.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Thus first of all in His own person He sanctified, restored, and blessed human nature.

Consistency is found in that work whose whole and detail are suitable to the occasion. It arises from circumstance, custom, and nature.

It was he who impressed, time and again, the necessity of singing as nature intended, and - I remember - he constantly warned, don't let the public know that you work. So I went slowly. I never forced the voice.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

I was 48-years old before anybody talked me into it for medicinal purposes, instead of some of these drugs that they give you that will lead you to heart surgery and things of that nature.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

We are all several different people. There are different aspects of our nature that are competing.

Because the quality of living with nature and allowing it to manifest itself is different than the quality of living in a city, especially a dense city.

Nature's laws must be obeyed, and the period of decline begins, and goes on with accelerated rapidity.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

Man can never be a woman's equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.

My connection with the Reich Ministers was of a purely official nature and was very infrequent.