All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.