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.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

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.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

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

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?