Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.