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.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.