Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever. - Iris Murdoch

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

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.’…

The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.