Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
I really don’t know what happens next – one so seldom does.
I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.
I am certainly an ought and not a must.
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
You want to love everyone equally, and that’s worse than impossible – it’s wrong.
God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.