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.
People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.
What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually – our sense of personality is a sense of outrage...
Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.
Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out – unique to oneself, one’s own, one’s claim to identity, it implicates one’s identity in its fibbing.
Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.
Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.