Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

Raids are slightly constipating.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.