Universities have a duty. They must ... concentrate on forming habits of attentive, discriminating, thoughtful reading among their students. ... They will have to take over the task of safeguarding contemporary standards as well as merely embalming those of the past.

My medium is not the novel, or the poem, or the play, or the short story: it is the vocabulary. And the decision as to which form to mould the words into must be a decision of the moment. There is some material that cries out for the poem, and there is some that cries out for the novel or the play.

Genuine criticism, the disinterested play of a critical mind over what one has done, is rare.

Education is the process whereby the mind is freed: freed by knowledge, by thoughtfulness, by imagination.

"To write well" means far more than choosing the apt word or the telling arrangement of syllables, though it means these things as well; it is a matter of feeling and living at the required depth, fending off the continual temptation to be glib and shallow, to appeal to the easily aroused response, to be evasive and shirk the hard issues.