... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

We have really no absent friends.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

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