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

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

life is a succession of readjustments.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.