What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

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?

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.