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Too many people dwell on the past: the thing is to get on with life.

The fact is that modern life has deprived us of life's one great luxury: time.

I think we could all do better sometimes of not overextending ourselves as much.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

It's often difficult to slough off all that we've acquired, all the comforts and safety nets modern life provides for us, and realize that in those days, people were living very much on the edge - life was incredibly hard!

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny.