An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

One gets started, and then, suddenly, one cannot remember what toothpaste they use . . . the moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.