The most important sentence in a good book is the first one it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.

A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it.

There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

Irony differentiates. Cynicism never does.