Quotes from Nicholas Mosley

There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious.

If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell.

I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.

It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is.

Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash.

To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.

But had I not cut the cord? and now was I seeing what happens when there is no gravity. There is indeed nothing, nothing; you are just falling. My father had said once (or was it you?) that the only emotions worth having are ecstasy and despair. I thought - Well yes, but there is also a terror at this nothing.

What if the need to have a hard time is built into human nature?

The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...

Love is in prospect or retrospect, the present is ecstasy.

It is very difficult to love people who are good to us: it is easier to imagine we are loving people we can condescend to.

The ritual was kissing her at various parts as if I were adorning her.

My father would say 'I think the trouble is that they don't have the ability to see just what it is they are doing.' I would say 'Is that difficult?' My father would laugh and say 'Yes, it's difficult.

I thought- This is why men build empires and go out into the desert; to get away from their loved ones and comfortable homes and to sit on floors with Arab chiefs and watch prostitutes.

Love is Noise. Love is silence. In love you're human. In love you possess magical powers. In love you shelter yourself. In love, you expose yourself.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.

The mark of a living thing is to be involved in opposites (impossibilities): the living cell that has to be continually adapting itself to stay alive, with its identity.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.