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

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.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features - the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

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.