To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

The living moment is everything.

Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world.

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.

I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.