Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

As a chamber hung round about with looking-glasses represents the face upon every turn, thus all the world doth the mercy and the bounty of God; though that be visible, yet it discovers an invisible God and his invisible properties.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.