Short Story Writers From England

"Love? Love was a concept with which he was no longer comfortable. At his age, it did not do to take anything too seriously, and the depressing thing about love was the seriousness which had to go with it, just as these days you couldn't seem to get jumbo sausage and chips in a pub without a salad being thrown in as well."

"It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch – or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea."

"In a long life, reflected the Flying Dutchman, I have come across many bloody silly ideas, but two of them are in a class of their own for pure untainted idiocy. One was the Court of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the other is the privatised British telephone service. A long way away, definitely in another continent and quite probably in another dimension, a little voice ask him to repeat the name."

"“It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this. “The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium.”"

"My mother can do it, of course, but then she understands machines. She tapes the Australian soaps, which I call a perverse use of advanced technology."

"It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It's rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it's all been worthwhile."

"Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me."

"“What did you think,” he asked – with obvious restraint – “of the music?” “I got used to it,” she replied, after a bit. “Like a dripping tap,” she added."

"When he left Quincy's he returned to the studios and went to see the man who was going to tell him everything he needed to know about sports broadcasting in twenty-five minutes. “The main thing,” said the expert, is to turn up on the right day at the right place and keep the sound recordists out of the bar. Leave everything else to the cameramen, and you'll do all right. That's it.”"

"Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing."

"“Give me your word of honour.” “On my word of honour,” said Danny. Obviously, he reflected, the man really didn’t know what a television producer was, or he would have demanded a different oath."

"But Hildy was no longer afraid. She had reached the point where fear can no longer help, and anger offers the only hope of survival."

"“It’ll be strange, of course. When I’m giving a lecture on Bothvar Bjarki and speculating on whether he was really just a sun-god motif imported from early Indo-European myth.” “Is he?” “Undoubtedly,” Hildy said. “The parallels are conclusive.” “I’ll tell him that,” said the King. “He’ll be livid.” “So are you,” she said, “probably. Or you’re an amalgamation of several pseudo-historical early dynasties, conflated by oral tradition and rationalised by the chroniclers. Your deeds are a fictionalized account of tribal disturbances during the Age of Migrations and you have no real basis in historical fact.” “Thank you, Vel-Hilda,” said the King. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.”"

"In the age of the supersonic airliner, a man can have breakfast in London and lunch in New York (if his digestion can stand it); but to get from Manchester to the north coast of Scotland between the waxing and the waning of the moon still requires not only dedication and cunning but also a modicum of good luck, just as it did in the Dark Ages."

"Wise is he who knows when to speak; wiser still, he who knows when to stay silent."

"When Danny had recovered from the shock of impact, he tried to open his door, but a man in a grey suit with a helmet covering his face opened it for him and showed him the blade of a large axe. If this was the Milk Marketing Board, they were probably exceeding their statutory authority."

"“That’s sad, in a way,” said King Hrolf. “I wouldn’t have minded being forgotten, but I’m not so keen on being debunked.” “Men die,” Hildy quoted, “cattle die, but the glory of heroes lives for ever. It’s just that these days people hate leaving well alone. They can’t bear anything to be noble and splendid anymore. But who knows? In a couple of hundred years or so, they may start believing in the old stories again. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”"

"All the great conspiracies of history have been bizarre, usually because of the incompetence of the leading conspirators."

"It was an indescribably beautiful thing, with the perfection of line and form that only something designed to be functional can have, lean and graceful and infinitely menacing, like a man-eating swan."

"Perhaps it was some magic in those extraordinary letters, first created at a time when any writing was by definition magical, a secret mark on silent metal that could communicate without speech to the eyes of a wise lore-master. Runes cannot help being magical, even if what they spell out is commonplace."

"“I’m an archaeologist,” said Hildy. “I dig up the past.” The king raised an eyebrow. “You mean you refresh old quarrels and keep alive old grievances? Surely not.” “No, no,” said Hildy, “I dig up ancient things buried in the earth. Things that belonged to people who lived hundreds of years ago.”… “Do you really?” said the King. “We used to call that grave-robbing.”"

"Malcolm listened to her laughter, and for the first time in his life he knew that everything was going to be all right. Niceness, he realized, it was not enough, and Love was only part of the rest. You had to have laughter, too. Laughter would make everything come out right in the end, or if it didn’t nobody would notice."

"His role in history was rather like that of lettuce in the average salad; it achieves no useful purpose, but there's always a lot of it."

"I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding what's going to happen after you're dead is a waste of good beer money."

"He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole."

"The authors of all the sagas she had read had been notably reticent about the cost of mass catering."

"You see, the last thing my daughter wants is to be happy. She’d hate it. No, what she wants is to be finally, definitively unhappy, and for it all to be my fault. It’d finally confirm all her dearest illusions about how her life has been ruined. People like that would far rather be right than happy."

"And what do they like doing best of all? They like taking off all their clothes—clothes over which they have expended so much effort and ingenuity—and doing biologically necessary but profoundly undignified things to other human beings. Any pig or spider can do that, it’s the easiest thing in the world. But you bloody humans, who can do so much that no other species could ever do, you can’t do that efficiently. You agonize over it. You make an incredible fuss over it. You get it all wrong, you make each others’ lives miserable, you write dreary letters and take overdoses. You even invent a medicine that deliberately makes the whole process futile. My God, what a species!"

"And so you give this irregularity in your minds a name of its own. You call it Love, which is meant to make everything all right. Rather than try and sort it out or find a vaccine, you go out of your way to glorify it. I mentioned your art and your poetry just now. What are your favorite themes? Love and War. The two things that any species can do, and which most species do much more sensibly than you lot—screwing and killing—are the things you humans single out to make a song and dance about. Literally."

"“You’re Loge, aren’t you? It’s odd. I was frightened of you when I thought you were the taxman, but now you turn out to be a God, I’m not frightened at all."

"Once again, Malcolm was moved to wonder at the stupidity, or at least the obscurity, of the King of the Gods; evidently the sort of person who, if asked to rescue a cat from a roof, would tackle the problem by burning the house down."

"And, like many missionaries, she was not above a little persecution in the cause of the communication of Enlightenment."

"“But isn’t everybody the same? Don’t the Gods and Goddesses ever fall in love? And didn’t you once to try and chat up the Rhinedaughters?” Alberich winced. “It is true that the High Gods do you occasionally fall in love. You have, as a matter of fact, singled out the one race nuttier than your own.”"

"Suddenly, she was not pretty at all; she looked like a thousand-year-old teenager who wanted something she knew she couldn’t have."

"It was irritating to have one’s physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger."

"Malcolm had never been greatly inclined to metaphysical or religious speculation, but he had hoped that if there was a supreme being or divine agency, it would at least show the elements of logic and common sense in its actions. Seemingly, not so. On the other hand, the revelation that the destiny of the world had been shaped by a bunch of verbose idiots went some way towards explaining the problems of human existence."

"They don’t mean anything, you know. They hurt, but they’re only feelings. They don’t draw blood or make it difficult for you to breathe. They’re all in the mind. Life is about eating and drinking and sleeping and breathing and working, and not being more unhappy than you absolutely have to."

"“I write stuff,” he said. I don’t necessarily believe it myself.”"

"“Humans!” laughed the male duck. “And it’s the likes of you run the world. No wonder the rivers are full of cadmium.”"

"Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasn't on the news, it couldn't really have happened after all."

"On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist."

"...the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression."

"(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything." Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders."

"For this is our central human problem: that we are almost constantly the victims of our emotions, always being swept up and down on a kind of inner-switchback. We possess a certain control over them; we can 'direct our thoughts' -- or feelings -- in such a way as to intensify them. This is certainly our most remarkable human characteristic: imagination. Animals require actual physical stimuli to trigger their experience. A man can retreat into a book -- or a daydream -- and live through certain experiences quite independent of the physical world. He can even, for example, imagine a sexual encounter, and not only experience all the appropriate physical responses, but even the sexual climax. Such a curious ability is far beyond the power of any animal."

"In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man."

"The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression."

"My own experience of mescalin is described in the appendix of Beyond the Outsider. My 'trip' was pleasant enough, although I experienced none of the visual effects described by Huxley; I was plunged into an agreeable but sluggish dreaminess. In this torpid state, I became aware of the problem mentioned by Huxley: 'How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations . . . ?' -- in my case, with my concern for my wife and three-year-old daughter? Although I personally felt nothing but a sense of relaxation and trustfulness, I was aware that, in practice, the world is full of dangers, and in this state, I was incapable of the necessary vigilance; it made me feel guilty. I was neglecting my job of looking after them. Moreover, my ability to think was impaired. Huxley remarks that he found his own ability to remember and 'think straight' to be little, if at all, reduced. I could 'think straight', but I could not think to any purpose. Even the feeling of universal love was not particularly pleasant; I compared it to having a large alsation dog who puts his paws on your shoulder and licks your face."

"It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result from freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos."

"I began to practice 'meditation', sitting cross-legged for hours, staring straight in front of me. The result was a sudden and total transformation of my inner-being. There was a sense of freedom from my personality -- from the being called Colin Wilson who was born in Leicester in 1931. I felt that 'he' was a series of responses and reactions, of ambitions and frustrations. But after half an hour of staring straight in front of me, of concentrating my attention 'at the root of my eyebrows', I felt in control of his responses and frustrations. This control brought such a sense of exhilaration and satisfaction that I often sneaked away from other people to spend just five minutes sitting cross-legged; when I was working as a labourer on a building site, I would find a quiet spot and, while the others were having a smoke, would sit in a position that could quickly be changed to an ordinary sitting posture if someone came by . . ."