A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.