The English have no imagination: and yet they do show imagination in two things - two only. In the evening-clothes worn by old ladies, and in their cafés.

England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt.

I begin to suspect that England is the most melancholy country in the world.

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

No adultery is bloodless.

My vocation is to write and I have known this for a long time. I hope I won't be misunderstood; I know nothing about the value of the things I am able to write. I know that writing is my vocation. When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me, I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands. But when I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.