All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

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

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing theairy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.