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.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

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

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 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.

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.