Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.