If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.