28 quotes
English novelist
“Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.”
"The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love."
on Love
"The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself."
on Life
"Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities."
"Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart."
on Art
"The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity."
on Philosophy
"There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist."
on Faith
"The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger."
on Anger
"And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you."
"That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will."
on Corruption
"The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"
"He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal."
on Wisdom
"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape."
on Writing
"What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me."
"Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society."
on Compassion
"An answer is always a form of death."
"We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words."
"But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating."
"I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist."
on Happiness
"When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies"
"Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination."
on Courage