The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

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

I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.