It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

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

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.

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.

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.

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.