Quote Tag

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I couldn’t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I’m regarded as one of their own in Japan.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.