“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.”

“Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”

“Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache.”

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

“Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.”

“I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the idols of religiosity and philosophy.”

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly.”

“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.”

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

“An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”