Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.
It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth’s almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights.
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public – you feel safe.
Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.
Nobody speaks the truth when there’s something they must have.
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it’s the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.
The silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence; it is tense and confined.
Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer’s take-down of a ‘real life’ conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In ‘real life’ everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.