The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been-no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan.

Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children.

The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.