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.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.