Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.