Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

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

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

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