I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.

Chumps always make the best husbands. All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains.