The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

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

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

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