Un des plus grands romanciers que l'Angleterre ait jamais eus. ("One of the greatest novelists that England has ever had.")

If anyone can be considered the greatest writer who ever lived, it is Shakespeare.

one of the greats...Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.

To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of Mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his Comick wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is alwayes great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the Poets,

As old Chaucer was wont to say, that broad famous English poet.

A man is known by the books he reads.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

He was, in the early twentieth century, the country's most eminent biographer and literary scholar.

The most outstanding intellect of this generation, the greatest poet that the Hellenistic age produced, and historically one of the most important figures in the development of Graeco-Roman (and hence European) literature.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

I take pride as the king of illiterature.

The wealthiest person on earth is one who appreciates.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers.