It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

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

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.