Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

The world is full of places to which I want to return

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.