Quotes from David Lodge

To appreciate the real value of marriage you have to discard the superficial idea of repetition as something boring and negative, and see it as, on the contrary, something liberating and positive -- the secret of happiness, no less. That's why B, in Either/Or, begins his attack on A's aesthetic philosophy of life (and the melancholia which goes with it) by defending marriage, and urging A to marry.

prayers to answer? Why would he cure my cancer, and let other poor buggers with the same condition die, not to mention the kids with leukaemia in the children's ward? Once he starts intervening in the course of nature, how does he decide when to stop?

Pope John Paul I had died and been succeeded by John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular - but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now? All bets are void, the future is uncertain, but it will be interesting to watch. Reader, farewell!

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

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

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

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.