Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.