“Entering the front door, you were at once assailed by a nightmare of cheerlessness and squalor, all the sordid melancholy, at its worst, of any nest of bedrooms where only men sleep;”

“Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.”

“Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.”

“Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.”

“One hears about life all the time from different people with very different narrative gifts.”

“Self-love seems so often unrequited.”

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.”

“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.”

“She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say "Ma-ma" or "Pa-pa": though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.”

“Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.”

“When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.”