To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

It's autumn and everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then.

Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.

What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.