Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

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

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

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

To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden - to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.

nothing is more restful than conformity.