"I retired 12 years ago from the profession of novelist. Nevertheless you would be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening." Chap. 1, p. 7

"'The point is, father,' I said, 'I shall never have any hope of making a good act of contrition.'" Chap. 11, p. 47

"The above must not, of course, be taken as a verbatim account of what happened." Chap. 12, p. 50

"1917 was, among other things, the year in which I began to make money." Chap. 16, p. 71

"Photostats of my diaries and notebooks arrived from the United States about three months after my 81st birthday, and I found therein days and weeks of my life pretty fully recorded, although there are considerable lacunae." Chap. 26 p...