Paul Scott (novelist)

"I was surprised, as one is, I think, whenever the tenuous thread of ones life suddenly connects, as friends, people one would have thought strangers."

"I had the impression she had become unconscious of her surroundings and was watching the past flick by like a series of moving pictures, silent, uncaptioned; a gate here, a fence there; doors opening upon rooms sometimes empty, sometimes crowded; and stairs, endless, endless stairs down which one was afraid to go for the terror that awaited ones return."

"It is said that every seven years of your life you undergo a change which reflects itself in your attitude to your circumstances and to other people, and I think this may be true. If it is, then the change begins towards the end of a seven-year span, at the point, perhaps, where dissatisfaction with what you are doing and with where you are going sets in."

"How ignorant one is when faced with essential practical matters. How they trick and trap you into holes and corners."

"Have you literary ambitions of your own?" "I have dabbled in my time." "Dabbled?" Bluntly, salting my own wound, I said "I had no staying power, Mrs Hurst. Not for the things I wanted to do, at any rate. I imagined much, started little, finished nothing and published not at all." "I think you are too easily discouraged." "I had no original creative talent. In the field of what might be called literary research I had a sort of painstaking, plodding conscientiousness which simply meant I was well on my way to becoming a hack of sound judgment. A man could go on turning out fatuous tripe until the cows come home without necessarily knowing it."

"I kept myself very much to myself, as one does if one is old and doesnt much care for the people round about."