What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.