For No Man Is Damned Precisely Because

Americans Will Listen, But They Do Not Care To Read. War And Peace Must Wait For The Leisure Of Retirement, Which Never Really Comes: Meanwhile It Helps To Furnish The Living Room.

If You Expect The Worst From A Person, You Can't Ever Be Disappointed... The Pessimist Takes A Sort Of Gloomy Pleasure In Observing The Depths To Which Human Behaviour Can Sink. The More Sin He Sees, The More His Belief In Original Sin Is Confirmed. Everyone Likes To Have His Deepest Convictions Confirmed; That Is One Of The Most Abiding Of Human Satisfaction.

It Was Like A Bird Of Rarest-spun Heaven Metal Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now.

That So Many Writers Have Been Prepared To Accept A Kind Of Martyrdom Is The Best Tribute That Flesh Can Pay To The Living Spirit Of Man As Expressed In His Literature. One Cannot Doubt That The Martyrdom Will Continue To Be Gladly Embraced. To Some Of Us, The Wresting Of Beauty Out Of Language Is The Only Thing In The World That Matters.

Novelists Are Perhaps The Last People In The World To Be Entrusted With Opinions. The Nature Of A Novel Is That It Has No Opinions, Only The Dialectic Of Contrary Views, Some Of Which, All Of Which, May Be Untenable And Even Silly. A Novelist Should Not Be Too Intelligent Either, Although He May Be Permitted To Be An Intellectual.