If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

The hunger of the spirit for eternity - as fierce as a starving man's for bread - is much less a craving to go on living than a craving for redemption. Oh, and a protest against absurdity.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

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

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.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.