Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.