But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

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

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.