Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

A Bowen, in the first place, made Bowen's Court. Since then, with a rather alarming sureness, Bowen's Court has made all the succeeding Bowens.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.