If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.

Wait and wait. Most people’s lives are spent waiting.

What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well – to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it – to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?

It is all right you’re saying you do not need other people, but there are a lot of people who need you.

It hadn’t shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he’ll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words.

Helen ran down a flight of stairs at the back of the house and into the garden. In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling. It seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words.

It was as though her woman’s hand was assisting him to make some minute readjustment of the machinery of his life.