Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, “Good God! Here I am again!” not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.
Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing – nothing. Only perhaps if it’s the book of a young person – or of a friend – no, even so, I think myself infallible.
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, ‘the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction’ when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren’t for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?
The poet is always our contemporary.
I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Theories then are dangerous things.
Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.
For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.
The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.