An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.