Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.

It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.