When you talk of revolution ... you never talk of the day after.

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

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

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

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.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.