Good writing is always new.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.