Gerald Brenan

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.