Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.

The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific.

Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.