Yes, my precious, we’ll divide our time between Sussex which is you, and the South of France, which is me, mystically speaking. We shall never saddle ourselves with any big responsibility or large house—but we’ll live beautifully…
Let me take Ngong, and everything that belongs to it, in my arms and sink with it, and it will be without complaint, but with immense gratitude to life.
To bear a hopeless passion for five years, and then murder one’s mistress—I don’t understand it!…I do not love tragic events en pure perte. If they do happen, I would have them historic. This is only of kin to history, and tends to nothing. It is very impertinent…
The thing I do in class is get them personally involved in what they’re writing and lambaste anything which sounds at all like they’re writing “literature” and try to get them to actually express secret life in whatever form it comes out. I practically take off my clothes in class to do it…
A: A trained ape…
B: We need to get this behind us. This nation admits its errors, as painful as they may be.
A: A trained ape preventing surveillance of millions of people at a time? That is totally within our abilities.
You know there’s really nobody that I can talk to with[out] being afraid of being laughed at, not even you. Right now, I’m afraid you’ll laugh when you read this; or worse, feel sorry for me and pity me, because I’m a[n] idealistic, romantic kid, who doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever come anywhere near telling you what I thought…
It is not known by everybody but: the peafowl is called peafowl because his favorite dish is peas-green peas, black-eyed peas, sweets or any peas that come to mind. Furthermore, the peacock sheds his tail every August and the alert owner goes behind with bucket and picks up each feather…
In other respects, he aims his shafts in the dark, and the success, or rather, ill-success of his hits makes me laugh rather than cry. His shafts of sarcasm are nicely polished, keenly pointed; he should not have wasted them in shooting at a mark he cannot see…
Is silence and solitude and isolation and leisure necessary for playwriting? It certainly is for poetry and musical composition. It is probably desirable for all artistic work. But most dramatists we read about seemed to have lived in a city turmoil…
A: We’re French, we had to put wine in the story. And so life had champagne parties.
B: Well, a party without champagne…
A: —Is a war without weapons. You know, if I was younger, we’d have had a great passionate affair for two years and been friends the rest of our lives. I can tell you that frankly. That said, if you violate my airspace, there will not be a funeral!
