each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.