Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Dogs are a habit, I think.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

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

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.