The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the...

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man’s life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.

There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying...

To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river, – the River of Heaven, – the Silver Stream.

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.

Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index.