Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.