Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.