Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.