For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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.