23.febr.99 Quotations from Milne's Autobioghapry.
This disheartened me. I realized that I was doing none of these things because I wanted to do them, but because I felt that I ought to improve myself. Starting next term, I would stop improving myself and spent every evening happily up-Library.
We were neither of us go-getters; we had discovered a talent for idleness; but I had a sort of jealous obstinacy, heritage of that 'I can do it' spirit.
There was a very attractive young woman on board who had all the men around her. When at the moments she caught my eye, she gave me that warm sudden smile which meant -that we two had some secret which the others did not share; then I felt I could have died for her, or thrown my cap overboard (though I was more doubtful about this) if she had so desired this.
To people like myself the Great Sacrifice was not the sacrifice of our lives but of our liberties.
As far as I remember, this was only lapse into unconventionality, unless a notorious distaste for lavatory jokes.
{Just as the practised public speaker singles out one man in the back of the audience and speaks solely to him, so I have singled out on hypothetical reader who is interested in me, and am writing solely for her.}
I was shyly drinking my ginger-beer, and wishing that I liked beer and whisky more than I liked rice-pudding.
Naturally I made an article out of all this. It was too long for The Evening News, and apparently too bad for every other paper. But the experience was not wholly wasted. At dances that autumn I would tell my partner that I had once spent a night alone on a desert island ... and get her surprised attention for a moment.
Leisured idleness is a lovely thing, but idleness without leisure is an invention of the devil.
I too old now to resent it, but I do find it funny.
We are not laboriously expressing somebody else's personality in order to please a publisher or annoy a critic.
I had always thought of Gerald as an artist, who did things "for fun". How else could write, paint, compose, act, engage in any of arts?
As soon as I had posted my letter, I did what I always do after refusing to write anything: wondered how I would have written it if hadn't refused.
I am not inordinately fond of or interested in children. I have never felt in the least sentimental about them.
I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I have always to escape. In vain.
I doubt if any 8/6 novels could be as dull as parts of Paradise Lost. From time to time I feel that the writer of 8/6 novel which I am reading was neither amused nor interested, and I envy him the staying-power which kept his pen work.
Sir Alfred pointed out that there was laugh in every line. I agreed complacently, "But you can have a laugh in the last line of verse," he protested. I asked why. Probably I thought that I was being an artist, but I know now that I was just being lazy.