The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.

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.

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.

It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.