Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.