One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.