A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

...he forgot for the while what experience had taught him-that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

An artist paints his picture not in a few hours but in all the years of experience before he takes up the brush, and it is the same with failure.