“Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammeds coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous...”

“And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.”

“But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”