A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
The evidence of paranormal research shows that there is a part of our being that knows far more than the conscious mind. And the evidence of mystics through the ages suggests that there is a part of our being that knows even greater secrets than this.
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
