In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still ... In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights, but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself.

People don't know the consolations of being unsuccessful ... If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.

cleverness is a disease.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.

Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.

Memory is the only friend of grief.