David Lodge Quotes

As to our universities, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are elitist where they should be egalitarian, and egalitarian where they should be elitist.

Another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s peers.

I gave up screwing around a long time ago. I came to the conclusion that sex is a sublimation of the work instinct.

The world is a global campus, Hilary, you’d better believe it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.

Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.

He understood… Walt Whitman, who laid end to end words never seen in each other’s company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor.

The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific.