When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.

She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference.

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.