I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.