I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

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.

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together