What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Artists often think they are going to die before their time. They seem to possess a heightened sense of the passing of the hours.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

There is something in animals beside the power of motion. They are not machines; they feel.

Each collected edition of Paper Girls that we put out will largely be set in an entirely different era.

I like people who can't die in their bed.

I'm aware, as a sane person, that I'm not the best-looking guy in the world. I'm aware of it. But when I go into a party, I will walk out with your girlfriend.

No one ever suddenly became depraved.

As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.

Sexual intercourse is a grossly overrated pastime; the position is undignified, the pleasure momentary and the consequences damnable.

One is responsible for one's own life. Passivity provides no protection.

An effort impelled by desire must also have an automatic or subconscious energy to aid its realization.

If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.