It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

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

That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.