To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase 'sincere and simple' - 'Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere' - under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with such rage that it ripped the paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had always taught him: 'Art is simple, art is sincere.' Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

To be quite candid - and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutory chill - I know more than I ca…

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to an…

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better i…

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde f…

Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.