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.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

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

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

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

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.