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.

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.