Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.