Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake – much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
The novelist’s – any writer’s – object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.
The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance – due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful – and possibly the only – help that can be given.
Love of privacy – perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society – has become in many people almost pathological.
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.
Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.
Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?
We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.
Silences can be as different as sounds.
Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.
What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.
Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.