Novelists From England

"He gets bored with the effort of trying to think, and is unhappy because he knows thinking, or at least “thinking-to-a-purpose” is on the black list of party activities."

"You know why I am a prisoner—because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment."

"“The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?” “More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.”"

"Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contra-terrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!"

"You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish."

"You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in."

"If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!"

"You were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex."

"Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?"

"The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust."

"Poverty is the natural state for humanity. Wealth starts in the stomach and corrupts it.…"

"Only a madman would claim that there is some thing unreal about reality."

"That is why you are so troubled. You see through the deception, yet you refuse to see through the deception."

"The stone in my hand hides A secret natural history: Climates and times unknown, A river unseen."

"I knew there was no ultimate ‘secret of the universe’—and in any case, supposing humanity to be merely a construct of the Korlevalulaw: who then ‘constructed’ the Korlevalulaw? The prime question was merely set back one step."

"The quest for pattern is a basic instinct."

"What we do not know is what became of the Korlevalulaw. They must have reigned so long, they must have been so invincible to all but Time."

"The greatest human achievement is to fulfil one’s destiny."

"Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed — now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down..."

"Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them — So they covered it up again..."

"I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer."

"Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem."

"Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name."

"There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked."

"All of which makes one feel that the centuries of science upon which our western culture is based have travelled unmarked through the popular mind. A surprising number of people are willing to junk the entire accumulation of knowledge since Ancient Greece after watching Uri Geller perform for five minutes on their twenty-three inch screen."

"Aldiss’s second law of thermo-linguistics states that what is most popular is rarely best and that what is best is rarely most popular."

"One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF."

"Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction — it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass."

"When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay."

"Keep violence in the mind where it belongs."

"One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir."

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts."

"The day of the android has dawned."

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime. I could curse for hours and hours — God help me."

"Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery."

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."

"It seems to us now that his system, for all its fervour, was largely negative, a mere assertion of his denial of the system of his upbringing. His God, for instance, must be the exact opposite of the 'gentle Jesus' of his childhood. There must be nothing at all gentle about the "dark" force to which the dark independent outlaws of his dreams would owe a sort of reverence. . . .The community to which Lawrence looked forward, the leaders and the led, is established. Men act, instead of wasting their energies in abstract thought. And yet, if Lawrence had seen it, he would have been appalled. Fascism finally succeeded, at least temporarily, in making the synthesis that eluded Lawrence."

"He had a mystical philosophy of "blood" which I disliked. "There is," he said, "another seat of consciousness than the brain and nerves. There is a blood consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness. One lives, knows and has one's being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life belonging to the darkness. When I take a woman, then the blood percept is supreme. My blood knowing is overwhelming. We should realize that we have a blood being, a blood consciousness, a blood soul complete and apart from a mental and nerve consciousness." This seemed to me frankly rubbish, and I rejected it vehemently, though I did not then know that it led straight to Auschwitz."

"The way he writes about flowers and birds and turtles always gets me. I like it much better than when he writes about sex in people. It's much less self-serving (You don't want that orgasm, Frieda, really you don't) and rooted in empathy."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels."

"These women discerned in Lawrence something primitive, something akin to their own nature. Like them, he had a taste for magic. His wife has said that he alone could teach human beings the art of living. Frail as he was, and so near to death, he had a religious awareness of moments of happiness. Before living with him, she declared, she had not lived at all. Those are the words of a woman whole-heartedly in love... Above all, he offered them that mixture of strength and weakness which satisfies women more than any other trait, because it rouses at once the maternal and the lover's passion."

"What was the secret of this power which Lawrence had over women? The art of pleasing? But he was brutal and often offensive. He forced Frieda, accustomed to a life of comfort, to wash clothes, do the kitchen work, carry bedroom pails. In moments of anger he would throw crockery about. Sometimes he struck her, and she struck back. To some of his friends who had difficulty in getting on with their wives, he would advise them to use physical force."

"The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer."

"Lawrence was a powerful early influence on me, Forster a more enduring one."

"when I was a kid, of course. I would read D. H. Lawrence and then I would turn out an absolute dreadful ten pages of D. H. Lawrence, or Tolstoy, or what have you, but only when I was a kid. The process of becoming a writer is the process of learning your own voice, and how to speak in your language, not somebody else's. It was along in my mid-to-late twenties that I began to get the skill to talk my own language."

"Is there no name later than Conrad's to be included in the Great Tradition? There is, I am convinced, one: D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, in the English language, was the great genius of our time (I mean the age, or climatic phase, following Conrad's)."

"Lady Chatterley's Lover defies reproduction in any manner whatever that would convey to our readers the abysm of filth into which Mr. D. H. Lawrence has descended. We have said that it is the foulest book in English literature. Though our knowledge of excursions in the lascivious by Oriental writers is limited, we do not hesitate to say that if a search were made through all the literatures of all the ages, as foul a book might be found, but certainly not a fouler. Mr. Lawrence is a great artist. It is because of this that his book excels in filth. A merely nasty-minded novelist of limited talent could not have written it. It was created, and created only, out of the turgid vigour of a poisoned genius. We leave it at that."

"There has been brought to our notice within the last few weeks a book which we have no hesitation in describing as the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness. The creations of muddy-minded perverts, peddled in the back-street bookstalls of Paris[,] are prudish by comparison."

"Isn’t it remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!"