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

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

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.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

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.