I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

I think it's one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.