... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.