Quote collection
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"I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters."
"The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time."
"I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them."
"The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed."
"I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest."
"The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities."
"The complex develops out of the simple."
"The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe."
"I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless."
"No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort 's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."
"The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university."
"Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality."
"If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings."
"Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist."
"It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century."
"Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess."
"Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence."
"I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider."
"Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of."
"It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline."