the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.

Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations ... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

The business of the artist is not to escape from his material medium or bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it, he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that in its service is perfect freedom.