Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.

I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and round and never comes out, but because it's an extraordinary picture of ceaseless change that never comes to an end.

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.