History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

We have really no absent friends.