One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.

I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.