It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

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.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.