A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.