... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

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

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.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

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

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.