Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

Life's bare as a bone.

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

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

All extremes are dangerous.

There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.