David Lodge Quotes

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

Every decoding is another encoding.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

It's a special form of scholarly neurosis, ´ said Camel. 'He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´

Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun.