Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.