If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

You can never know enough about your characters

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They're both very good things. I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you're ground down by convention. You can't think as you like and you can't act as you like. That's because it's a democratic nation. I expect America's worse.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

Do you absolutely despise me, Walter?" "No." He hesitated and his voice was strange. "I despise myself.