Better Counsel comes overnight.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

I have kept diaries, of course, but they can't be read for quite a long time. I'm always curious about people who are fascinated by writers' lives. It seems to me that we're always in our books, quite nakedly. I wonder, too, does the private life really matter? Who cares what is known about you and what isn't? Even when you make public something that's been private, most people don't get it - not unless they're the same generation and have gone through more or less the same experiences. So, in a sense, we're all private, by definition.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.