Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us - that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions - they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate.

Raids are slightly constipating.