Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

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

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

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.

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

nothing is more restful than conformity.

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