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.

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

...she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her, like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word 'we' - and perhaps without intention - he had let her know that he loved her.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

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