... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

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

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

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.