At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

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?

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.