First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context.

Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

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.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.