It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.

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.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.