Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

The world is always in movement.

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

I grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered the bigger world.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.