Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.

I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.