[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.