Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

The greatest pleasure is not - say - sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity - well, that's the job of the writer.

Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.

To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be

I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.