A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

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

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

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.