One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

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

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.