Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.