The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.