What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

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

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

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.