Quotes
Quotes about Wit
But what happens when you die?â âYouâre finished withâ, Enderby said promptly. âDone for. And even if you werenât â well, you die then, gasp your last, then youâre sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.â
The urgent task is the task of conservation. The hold the complex totality of linguistic meaning within a shape you can isolate from the dirty world
You have to learn to be alone â no sex, not even any books. All youâll have is language, the great conserver, and poetry, the great isolate shaper. Stock your minds with language, for Christâs sake. Learn how to write whatâs memorable. No, not write â compose in your head.
Man is much more than a dog but, like a dog, he is within range of scientific analysis
'There has to be eternal chastisement. That means eternal life.' 'A bit one-sided, all stick, no sugar. Listen, we're all sent to one big bedroom. Hitler undivided from John the twenty-third, the innocent and guilty, raped and rapist, with no cup of tea or orange juice to wake us up'.
God made his mind up, right from the beginning, that some were damned, some saved, and strictly what you did with life, saintly by choice or sinning, mattered to God not one benighted jot. You prosper? That probably means you're winning. You're losing, lost - the sudden voices shout it. You're lost, and nothing can be done about it.
An end should be quick and sharp without malice
Dying, he knew the scream would not die with him, not yet. It lived for a time its own life.
I will not force apart the jaws of heaven for my precocious entering. Heaven may open in its own good time without my prompting.
I mean, what the hell can you do with love except cleanse yourself of it by debasing the image to a lust object?
I believe that the majority of composers are too preoccupied with the building of structures to concern themselves with 'emotion'
Music deals in sound without clear referents. Music is multiguous,since it is capable of many interpretations. Music, one might say, is Hopkinsian.
The trouble with even sincere and sensible statements is that they can deal only in either tautology or lies
It is enough to get on with the task of creating art without asking why one is doing it
God, are we really free or sick from birth with sap from the parent tree?
I've lived a life spurting with brave bravura
The difference between the films and the real thing was, as I said, mainly that the real thing had its own smell and that the real thing was more genuine, with people spitting and swearing and having pimples and boils
On the treshold of old age I find myself pretty much without roots - except, as it were, mythical or historical ones that would better do in a TV series than in real life
Spending half an hour or an hour, or two hours, on a piece of narrative fiction gives us the same kind of holistic, the same kind of total effect, the effect of being absorbed in an artistic experience without interruption that we get from listening to a piece of music
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence
We are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood, and metal that produced civilisation
It is the godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with ´free will
Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temparament with which you have endowed them
The better novelists write with their ears
Novels are about the human condition, which is not easy, and how, if possible, to cope with it
