Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.

To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.

roses are the only flowers at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.