Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

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?

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his.

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

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.

Convention was our safeguard: could one have stronger?

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.