Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.