If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
…I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked ‘What a pity we can’t make love, there’s nothing else to do,’ and he agreed that it was and there wasn’t.
George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.
I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.
Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like the animals.
Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.
That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire … Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.
It seemed to me then that to have published a book – any kind of book – would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
If you really have talent, you know, you’ll go on writing – whatever people say to you.
Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.
The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything. That’s just why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment…
A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good mor
What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, ‘Oh, our attitude has changed. We don’t dislike these people any more.’ But by the strangest coincidence, they haven’t taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.