It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that is where we really belong.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.

They are always saying God loves us. If that’s love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.

The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Sentimentality – that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.

Failure too is a form of death.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect – it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.