I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

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?

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

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.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.