The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Words, isolated in the velvet of radio, took on a jeweled particularity. Television has quite the opposite effect: words are drowned in the visual soup in which they are obliged to be served.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally predictable from beginning to end.

We thought philosophy ought to be patient and unravel people's mental blocks. Trouble with doing that is, once you've unravelled them, their heads fall off.

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.