“I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.”

“As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

“And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”

“It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.”

“All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.”

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”