Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

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

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.