somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

nothing is more restful than conformity.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.