There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.