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

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

Sacrificers ... are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice. Oh, the sacrificers, they get it both ways. A person knows themselves that they're able to do without.

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.