“Human beings have their great chance in the novel.”

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.”

“At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists.”

“It matter so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides.”

“There's never any great risk as long as you have money.”

“But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.”

“The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”