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.

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

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.

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

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.

It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.

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