If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

whenever possible I avoid talking. Reprieve from talking is my idea of a holiday. At risk of seeming unsociable, which I am, I admit I love to be left in a beatific trance, when I am in one. Friendly Romans recognize that wish.