48 Quotes by Robert Aickman

You speak English beautifully, which means you can't be English.

Nothing is more lethal to the effect that a ghost story should make than for the author to provide alternative materialist solution. This reduces a poem to a puzzle and confines the reader’s spirit instead of enlarging it.

It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.

Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.

Things mechanical are like the ladies,’ continued Toby. ‘You need to understand their ways. If you understand them, they’ll do what you want from the start. If you don’t, they’ve got you. And then God help you.

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely

At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.

We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.

There seemed to be something in him that made him different from most of the people he encountered in the office or in the train or in the park or at the houses of others. He could not succeed in defining what this difference was, and he simultaneously despised and congratulated himself for having it. He would sincerely have liked to be rid of it, but at the same time was pretty sure it was the best thing about him.