A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.