One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

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

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

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

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.