a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.
Language is memory and metaphor.
No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.
invaders always destroy libraries.
There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.
As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.