13 Quotes by Derek Raymond

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

It's wearying, like Caliban buttonholing you in hell and telling you the struggle he's having getting along with himself.

...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.

You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.

It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don’t happen to like them all that much there’s nothing you can do about it — unless you’re prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I’m not the type.—Crust on Its Uppers, p. 87

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

She doesn’t think she’s worthy to live. But she doesn’t realize, she is life.

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.

I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street.