Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.