The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.