With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.

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

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

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.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Education is not so important as people think.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.