Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghost… - Iris Murdoch

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.’…

What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.

But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all. The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him.