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.

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

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

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

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

Writing is above all a question of instinct.

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.