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

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

life is a succession of readjustments.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

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.

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.

Plot is the knowing of destination.