I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

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.