“The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.”

“Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.”

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”

“The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence.... I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality.... But I've always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don't see how the "lies" we write and the "lies" we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him.... I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them - and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.(Letter to Jo Jones, September 15, 1980, arguing for the preservation of John Collier's personal papers)”

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.”

“He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.”

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.”