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.

There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

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

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.