Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

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.

We have really no absent friends.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.