Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.