Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.