There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.

So it is useless to evade reality, because it only makes it more virulent in the end. But instead, look steadfastly into the slit, pin-pointed, malignant eyes of reality: as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts. Take it by the scruff of the neck, and shake the evil intent out of it; till it rattles out harmlessly, like gall bladder stones, fossilized on the floor.

One should never go back to a place one has loved; for, however, rough the going forward is, it is better than the snuffing out-of-love return.

Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing.

My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.

England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots.

There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.