Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.
Poets are not meant to be in competition.
Literature is a house with many mansions.
Failing to see the point is not a virtue.
A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.
It's never over till it's over with a friend.
Rejection is the one constant of human experience.
Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up.
When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.
Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.
Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.
Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.
I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.
Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with.
The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.
Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.
Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.
When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market.
Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.
Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.
In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.
I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.
You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.
There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences.
Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.
A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.
There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.
I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.
Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.
Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.
I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.
If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.
The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.
In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.
Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.
You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.
The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.
I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing.
A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.
Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway.
As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.
Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal.
Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.
The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.
Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one.
To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.