Only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.

When starting to think about any novel, part of the motive is: I'm going to show them, this time.

If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.

Education is one thing and instruction, however worthy, necessary and incidentally or monetarily educative, another.

Death has this much to be said for it: You don't have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free.