To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions - they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

But surely love wouldn't get so much talked about if there were not something in it?

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.