To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.