Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

...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.

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?

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.