Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

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?

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

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

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.