For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed.

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.

Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.