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

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.