These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.

that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.