I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.