“Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.”

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

I don’t think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more – absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Keenness of hearing revives when one is alone.

All worthwhile writing… comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

There’s no tiling moral about beauty.