One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.