There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne - bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive. One only feels really free when one can go in whatever direction one pleases over the plains, to get to the river at sundown and pitch one's camp, with the knowledge that one can fall asleep beneath other trees, with another view before one, the next night.

I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.

It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.

I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.

While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.