Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.

When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.

We read books to find out who we are.

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.