"I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible." "That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave." "The… - Iris Murdoch

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you.

I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.'
‘Oh Christ !’
‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just write them of. You must be curious about them. Curiosity is kind of charity.’
‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’
‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’
‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’
‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold.
‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’
‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’
‘Your wife thinks you do.’
‘Oh that. Oh God.’
‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art. ‘
‘Of course it isn’t -‘
‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the othet.’
‘Bradley, I know you -‘
‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silnce.’
‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more mean worse!’
‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by -‘
‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’
‘Then thank God I’m not one.’…