Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

Education is not so important as people think.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.