129 quotes
'How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.'
Napoleon Symphony (1974)
'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'
The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)
‘You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?’
The Right to an Answer (1960)
He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'
The Right to an Answer (1960)
I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
Earthly Powers (1980)
She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden.
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.
Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)
'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'
Napoleon Symphony (1974)
…love…In all languages the word is treacherous and hard to define.
Man of Nazareth (1979)
The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
The Right to an Answer (1960)
Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.
The Right to an Answer (1960)
Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.
A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)
Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.
Beds in the East (1959)
…it is not easy to mark the boundaries of politics and religion.
Man of Nazareth (1979)
Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.
A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)
The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil.
The Doctor is Sick (1960)
‘…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.’
The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…
Time for a Tiger (1956)
(Singapore) is not even a place where a white man is permitted to go to pieces....
Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)