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

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.