My mind is not suited to go much into company.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. 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.

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

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

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

... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.