Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!