Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex… - Aldous Huxley

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate — to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse — touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. Bus his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabels were destoryed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defenses this morning.

Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude - that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence.