When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

...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.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.