The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.

She touted [the convention] in her campaign literature until she lost — badly,

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.