You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?