They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

We're not savages. We're English.

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.

The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.