Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

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.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.