The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

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

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

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.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.