Santayana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it to… - Clive James

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this.