“It may be thought almost paradoxical that writers who are most in favour of transmutation”

“It is the duty of a writer to protect and argue in favour of those who are oppressed, sufferers, whether an individual or a group deprived.”

“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

“Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.”

“One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.”

“I thought I was a Conservative. I thought I was a Conservative, but all the time I was in favour of… I was in favour of shortcuts to Utopia. I was in favour of the government doing things, because I was so impatient for good things to be done.”

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”

“This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.”

“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.”

“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.”