Plot is the knowing of destination.
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.
Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.
Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.
Style is the thing that’s always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.
Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one’s own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.
In ‘real life’ everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
The paradox of romantic love – that what one possesses, one can no longer desire – was at work.
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...
I think the main thing, don’t you, is to keep the show on the road.
Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.
Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
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.