People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.