A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since early youth. Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings. Their nature is such that our relationship has been very intimate. No literature has ever been so shockingly personal as that of our time - it asks every question that is forbidden by polite society.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological rea…

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.