No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

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.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

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.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.