“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.”

“He had discovered that people who allow themselves to be blown about by the winds of emotion and impulse are always unhappy people.”

“...I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.”

“If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.”

“....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book.”

“You surpise me, because people nearly always force you to ask, don't they?”

“I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.”