History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.

One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.