Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.