Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.