We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

Couldn't a fire outrun a galloping horse?

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

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.

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

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

I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.