After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.

Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

Nothing great ever came out of common sense.

Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!

I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.