It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

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

All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?