No great thing happens suddenly.

I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.