Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

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

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.