Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.

Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.

As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state.

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.