writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

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

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

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.