Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

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.