“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men; they are far superior and always have been.”
“Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
“The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.”
“Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.”
“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”
“Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.”
“Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
“If you… scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.”
“What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.”
“I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.”
“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.”
“When I wrote ‘Lord of the Flies’ – I had no idea it would even get published.”
“Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”
“I’d rather there wasn’t an afterlife, really. I’d much rather not be me for thousands of years.”
“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.”
“Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.”
“I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist’s discipline forces him to ignore.”
“I have been in many countries, and I have found there people examining their own love of life, sense of peril, their own common sense. The one thing they cannot understand is why that same love of life, sense of peril and above all common sense, is not invariably shared among their leaders and rulers.”
“Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.”
“A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.”
“Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.”
“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”
“While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion – namely, that I myself could not think at all.”
“He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.”
“I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to them.”
“Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.”
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