When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

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.

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.