Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.