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.
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
We have really no absent friends.
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?