to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.