What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?