Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

I have no technical psychological interest; it is drama, speech,and events that interest me.