Earthly Powers

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

I must give up seeing people, I told myself.

Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

But don’t think that it’s a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It’s our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it’s cold outside. But it’s not the cold’s fault that it’s cold.

In other words, I heard life going on, and it was a comfort.

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality.

The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.

...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently.