Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

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

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

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

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.

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.