Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.