Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

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

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.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.