“That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.”

“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”

“Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.”

“The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”

“I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, becuase I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people - and there my vanity steps in...”

“The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.”