Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.