Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.

I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.

The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.