Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.

Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.