In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.