... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

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

Makes of men date, like makes of car.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.