The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

But complex people are never certain that they are not crooks, never certain their passports are quite in order, and are, therefore, unnerved by the slightest thing.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.