Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Dogs are a habit, I think.

whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.