One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

A novelist can shift view-point if it comes off. ... Indeed, this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge - I find one of the great advantages of the novel-form ... this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.