A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

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.

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.