All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.