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

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

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.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.

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

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.