On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either f….

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the close….

Books do furnish a room..

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on..

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, the….

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you..

I get a warm feeling among my books..

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since t….

A dance to the music of time..

Writing is above all a question of instinct..

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that lightness of touch which gives understanding of life..

He gave me a look of great contempt; as I supposed, for venturing, even by implication, to draw a parallel between a lack of affluence that might, li….

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it..

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unco….

You have to be a product of the product..

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work..

[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing..

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually ….

For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspect….

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity..

Parents. . . are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfil the promise of their early years..