Autumn arrives in the early morning.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

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

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.