If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

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

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

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.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.