With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he didnot intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.