Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

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.

When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

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