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

... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

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.