When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

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