If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.