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.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.