I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.

Readers tend to devour short stories on a newssheet, but would be disinclined to read them in collections.

I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.

To my mind’s eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don’t know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream.

The conversation of the gods! – I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand, that was in order too: they were something in a foreign language – star-talk.

Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was.

My dream had become my reality: my old life was a discarded husk.

Grown-ups didn’t seem to realize that for me, as for most other schoolboys, it was easier to keep silent than to speak. I was a natural oyster.

To see things as they really were – what an empoverishment!

It’s better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.