But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.