Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.