Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

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

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

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?