Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

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

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.