“she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.”

It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy.

The squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

Three cheers for war, noble and beautiful above all.

You have to rise above the squabbling and chaos, and keep believing. You have to always keep your goals in mind.” -Hera, goddess of marriage

He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.

The Italian people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the Italian people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.

The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training – sacrifice.

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.