Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Almost everybody wore a curious limpidity of expression, like newborn babies or souls just after death. Dazed but curiously dignified.... after a criseof hysterical revulsion and tiredness, I passed beyondand became entered by a rather sublime feeling.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

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?