No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

Good readers make much out of little.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.