Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

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

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.