"If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air."

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

"Laughter is by definition healthy."

"Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk…"

"You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?"

"Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't ha…"

"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."

"My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it w…"

"There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best."

"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."