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.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

We have really no absent friends.

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

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.