“In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. Owen Barfield”

“Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.”

“Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.”

“Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.”

“We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.”

“Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.”

“If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow...”

“The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.”

“Reading the very best writerslet us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoyis not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right abou...”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”