I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

Whatever a human being makes and makes live, it lives because of the life he puts into it.

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.