There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.