For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

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

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.