When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

We live for books.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

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.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.