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

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

Hope is a talent like any other.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

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.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.