The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.

The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.