I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.
Though there are very serious disadvantages about being a true believer. Who would want four wives at any time, especially when one pays for the doubtful privilege by abstaining from wine?
His officers saw little of him, and did not love what they saw.
When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.
I’d rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.
I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.
Novel writing wrecks homes.
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
The work is with me when I wake up in the morning; it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress.
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.
Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.
Everything was in stark and dreadful contrast with the trivial crises and counterfeit emotions of Hollywood, and I returned to England deeply moved and emotionally worn out.
I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.
A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.
A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.
I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.