JOYCE CARY

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul - politics does the same thing for the body.

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer.

Remember I'm an artist. And you know what that means in a court of law. Next worst to an actress.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.

Something you have to make...It's all work, work.

No honest hardworking official likes to see good money disappearing into the hands of the Treasury at the end of the financial year.

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.

I had come at last and my heart was beating again strongly to a heart that could not know despair because it forgot itself in the duty of its love.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.