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

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

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.

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.

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