As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

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

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

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