In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.