Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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.

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.