It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.