Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

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

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.