Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

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.

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?

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.

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