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.

You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings... serendipitously.

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.