Quotes About Author

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.

I'd like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression of continual tedium in a sensual nightmare.

Good deeds are impositions; that's why I categorically abhor them.

Kindness is a temperamental caprice and we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprice however humane or tender-hearted.

Over the diversely high rooftops the light lets its hands slip away until, in the unity of those same rooftops, the inner shadow of everything emerges.

I sleep on my elbows propped painfully on the railing and feel a great promise in knowing nothing.

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES

The absurd lie has all the charm of the perverse with the even greater, ultimate charm of being innocent

the chance circumstances of his life and the direction it had taken were dictated by his instincts, in his case inertia and detachment.

To have occasion to…' In this space the statue of renunciation will be raised.

Brussels,' as Richard Weight puts it, 'replaced Brixton as the whipping boy of British nationalists.

the far-right is the white man's #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.

Trellis wants his salutary book to be read by all. He realizes that purely a moralizing tract would not reach the public. Therefore he is putting plenty of smut into his book.

and you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity.

There's no nonsense about the gun. It's quick, it's merciful, and it's clean.

Recently in mixed company...I ventured to make the claim ( not without some show of humility and modesty ) that I was the greatest living swine.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: "If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product." My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you're not a lady? she says.

When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.

Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven.

In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise.

For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.