Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.

I don't have a very high opinion, actually, of the world of criticism - or the practice of criticism. I think I admire art criticism, criticism of painting and sculpture, far more than I do that of say films and books, literary or film criticism. But I don't much like the practice. I think there are an awful lot of bad people in it.

Not naive,' Conch shell had corrected him. 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.

Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.