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.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.