Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

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.