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.
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.
But surely love wouldn’t get so much talked about if there were not something in it?
Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.
No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Education is not so important as people think.
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature’s penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland...
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else’s do.
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
Certain books come to meet me, as do people.
For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.
Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.
After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.
All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.