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

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.