Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.