For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

English literature is a flying fish.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.

Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum.

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

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'