"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."

"The soul of a writer is a very odd fish."

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

"I have lost my temper more often in the last year than in my whole life before."

"I am reading the life of Queen Victoria. She was a very stupid woman."