The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.