No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

I will never again attempt to tell any young person what to do - the really gifted don't need advice and the others can't take it.