I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.