It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

If you only would!" He added rather diffidently: "If you would not mind remembering that I am a military court of inquiry. It makes it easier for me to report to the general if you say things dully and in the order that they happened.

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.

It is not merely that people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel - in the old ways and all the time.