Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.

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.

Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

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