The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.