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.

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.

If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.

A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.