Sybille Bedford

"' ... had been earning its advance, and Aldous was being paid royalties. The book sold 2,500 copies in the first year and 86 the year after. (', Scott Fitzgerald's first novel published the year before, sold forty-five thousand.) Cash in hand, Aldous enrolled Suzanne in an art course he had seen advertised in '."

"The descendants of the sleeping on the pavements of are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these, but it is always the last."

"The were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones."

"Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the , about the pleasure of food and wine, or — in contrast — about the overstuffed house of a solid Jewish family in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. A short paragraph of hers can expand in the reader's mind into a hinterland of suggestion and sensation. However does she do it? She says in Quicksands that she took a lesson from Ernest Hemingway's remark that "all you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there"."

"No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream, dumplings stuffed with curried mice. One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion". Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer, and her elegant, insightful work."