London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books.
The people had once created the city. The city now created the people, or, more exactly, the people of Venice now identified themselves more in terms of the city. The private had become public.
The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon “Grand Tours” of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.
He had been living in the dark world of his anxieties, and no infliction of reality could seem more terrible than that.
Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear.
He felt at peace only in the hour before dawn, when the darkness seemed to give way slowly to a mist, and it was at this hour that he would wake and sit by his window.
He saw the sunlight leave the grass like an eye suddenly closed.
The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.
But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.
There is no real origin for anything. Everything just exists. Everything just exists in order to exist.
Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.
The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.
The less you see, the more you can imagine.
It is the nature of humankind to idealize, to indulge in excessive praise as well as unjust condemnation.
I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.
And we recall in Dickens’ fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.
What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Ah,’ Arthur cried out, ‘I have never known one month of repose since I took up the crown. I have lost the key to contentment.
In the old wild days of the world there was a king of England known as Uther Pendragon; he was a dragon in wrath as well as in power.
As a result of Malory’s plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d’Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere, and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.