... 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.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

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

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.