There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

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?

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson; what you are to know you pick up as you go along.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.