Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

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

Being in love is an exhausting business.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

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.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.