every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.