Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

The belly comes before the soul.

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.