I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.
I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)
He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.
We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we say, the tree, the pool, / And see the fire in the air, the sun, our sun, / Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now / Particularly our sun.
In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss
There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.
I was no good at being a child.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: