I have a great belief in Dan Brown’s attractions as a writer. The belief is all the greater because I can’t quite define what those attractions are

People tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests, and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests

Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?

Asking who won a given war is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake

The old cliché about having all your eggs in one basket takes on new meaning with Canada and the United States, because there is something even more wrong about having all your eggs in someone else’s basket

I have suffered for my music. Now it’s your turn

How we feel about ‘the nature of existence’ is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.

I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician

Every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable

Relativism thrives when people do not have to shoulder the burden of actually coming to a conclusion

To explode a myth is not to deny the facts, but to re-allocate them.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative

Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably by one’s forebears

I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version

To act virtuously is not to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues

Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology

One of the disadvantages of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife’s ear