“I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller”

“I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.”

“Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.”

“Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.”

“I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.”

“A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.”

“With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.”