Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.