Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?

Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.

True literature should rouse the reader, unsettle him, change his view of the world, give him a resolute push over the cliff of self-knowledge

If Wells recognized any merit in [Henry] James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all. p. 516

Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.

I don't think traveling back in time on an empty stomach is a good idea.

Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?