Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

Because clearly the most amazing thing had happened: by some chance - no, the lover does not believe in chance, but destiny - destiny had arranged it so that the man and woman who had made the original whole, then somehow divided and separated by an angry God, had met up again, and now must reform the rightful, righteous whole. At once!

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.