The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

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

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

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.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.