My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

Life would split apart without letters.

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

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.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.