Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.