Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

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.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.