Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. ‘Yes, I see, dear; it’s about half-way between,’ Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.