You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.