Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
One’s sentiments – call them that – one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.
To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden – to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.
There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk.
Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world – a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
Dogs are a habit, I think.
Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.
When one is a child, the disposition of objects, tables and chairs and doors, seems part of the natural order: a house-move lets in chaos – as it does for a dog.
Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.
Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Makes of men date, like makes of car.