I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.

Far away Tongariro! Green - white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word.

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.

I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.

I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.