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

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.