Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose