“Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.”

“Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.”

“He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.”

“Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way.”

“Death has this much to be said for it:You don't have to get out of bed for it.Wherever you happen to beThey bring it to you—free.”

“Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.”

“I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it.”

“There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed.”

“I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.”

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

“It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.”