Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

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.

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.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.