In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

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.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

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.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

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